“What’s the matter with you, Kristin?” asked Fru Aashild a little impatiently. “You must be strong now and not so despondent.”
“I’m thinking about all the people we have hurt so that we could live to see this day,” said Kristin, shivering.
“It wasn’t easy for you two either,” said Fru Aashild. “Not for Erlend. And I imagine it’s been even harder for you.”
“I’m thinking about those helpless children of his,” said the bride in the same tone as before. “I wonder whether they know that their father is celebrating his wedding today…”
“Think about your own child,” said Fru Aashild. “Be glad that you’re celebrating your wedding with the one who is the father.”
Kristin lay still for a while, helplessly dizzy. It was so pleasant to hear it mentioned—what had occupied her mind every single day for three months or more, though she hadn’t been able to breathe a word about it to a living soul. But this helped her for only a moment.
“I’m thinking about the woman who had to pay with her life because she loved Erlend,” she whispered, trembling.
“You may have to pay with your own life before you’re half a year older,” said Fru Aashild harshly. “Be happy while you can.
“What should I say to you, Kristin?” the old woman continued, in despair. “Have you lost all your courage? The time will come soon enough when the two of you will have to pay for everything that you’ve taken—have no fear of that.”
But Kristin felt as if one landslide after another were ravaging her soul; everything was being torn down that she had built up since that terrifying day at Haugen. During those first days she had simply thought, wildly and blindly, that she had to hold out, she had to hold out one day at a time. And she had held out until things became easier—quite easy, in the end, when she had cast off all thoughts except one: that now their wedding would take place at last, Erlend’s wedding at last.
She and Erlend knelt together during the wedding mass, but it was all like a hallucination: the candles, the paintings, the shining vessels, the priests dressed in linen albs and long chasubles. All those people who had known her in the past seemed like dream images as they stood there filling the church in their unfamiliar festive garb. But Herr Bj?rn was leaning against a pillar and looking at them with his dead eyes, and she thought that the other dead one must have come back with him, in his arms.
She tried to look up at the painting of Saint Olav—he stood there, pink and white and handsome, leaning on his axe, treading his own sinful human form underfoot—but Herr Bj?rn drew her eyes. And next to him she saw Eline Ormsdatter’s dead countenance; she was looking at them with indifference. They had trampled over her in order to get here, and she did not begrudge them that.
She had risen up and cast off all the stones that Kristin had striven so hard to place over the dead. Erlend’s squandered youth, his honor and well-being, the good graces of his friends, the health of his soul—the dead woman shook them all off. “He wanted me and I wanted him, you wanted him and he wanted you,” said Eline. “I had to pay, and he must pay, and you must pay when your time comes. When the sin is consummated it will give birth to death.”
Kristin felt that she was kneeling with Erlend on a cold stone. He knelt with the red, singed patches on his pale face. She knelt beneath the heavy bridal crown and felt the crushing, oppressive weight in her womb—the burden of sin she was carrying. She had played and romped with her sin, measuring it out as if in a child’s game. Holy Virgin—soon it would be time for it to lie fully formed before her, looking at her with living eyes, revealing to her the brands of her sin, the hideous deformity of sin, striking hatefully with misshapen hands at his mother’s breast. After she had borne her child, after she had seen the marks of sin on him and loved him the way she had loved her sin, then the game would be played to the end.
Kristin thought: What if she screamed now so that her voice pierced through the song and the deep, droning male voices and reverberated out over the crowd? Would she then be rid of Eline’s face? Would life appear in the dead man’s eyes? But she clenched her teeth together.
Holy King Olav, I call to you. Among all those in Heaven, I beg you for help, for I know that you loved God’s righteousness above all else. I beseech you to protect the innocent one who is in my womb. Turn God’s anger away from the innocent, turn it toward me. Amen, in the precious name of the Lord.